by Kate Quinn
“If she’s just his daughter.” Pantisilea widened her eyes.
“None of that,” I said in the same tone I’d always used when gossip among my kitchen apprentices shaded a bit too salacious.
She waggled an eyebrow. “Everyone’s saying it.”
I glared at her, fists on hips. “How long have you worked in the Borgia household, Pantisilea? Have you ever seen anything, one thing, to justify gossip that foul?”
“Well, no—”
“Then hold your tongue. It’s vile and disgusting, and I won’t have talk like that in my kitchens.”
“They aren’t your kitchens, Carmelina Mangano,” she laughed.
“They are for now.” I rubbed a pinch of sugar between my fingers, wrinkling my nose at the quality. “So, no filthy gossip about Madonna Lucrezia.”
Someone should have told that to the Count of Pesaro. Sweet Santa Marta, how the rumors were flying, and it was all his fault! He’d gone stamping and raging off to Milan, begging help from his more illustrious relatives to fight the annulment, and he hadn’t been satisfied calling the Pope a marrano bastard or a Spanish upstart. No, he’d had to burst out with a lot of resentful whining that the Holy Father only wanted Lucrezia free so he could have her himself.
I don’t believe for a moment that he meant it, not the way it sounded. You had only to see the Pope with his daughter to know they were entirely fond of each other, and not in any disgusting way. But the Pope clearly considered Madonna Lucrezia his daughter first and Lord Sforza’s wife second; everyone in Rome knew that—and it was the kind of thing to make any husband jealous.
If it had just been the Count of Pesaro doing a little resentful muttering up in Milan, that would have been one thing. But Fra Savonarola had gotten hold of all those rumors clear down in Florence, where he was supposed to be making a Holy City for himself and not just listening for smut. But priests are always listening for smut.
“The nest of Borgia vipers in the Vatican, violating even the laws of blood in their unholy lusts!” Fra Savonarola thundered to his flock, and soon his words were being repeated all the way from Rome to Venice, and in every city, town, and village hamlet in between. “Brother services sister, and father services daughter, no better than beasts wallowing in the mire—” On and on it went, and everyone from Fra Savonarola to Pantisilea seemed happy to embellish the rumors.
I imagine the Holy Father had waved it off as briskly as he waved off any foul rumor. He’d have heard it all before, no doubt. But with Fra Savonarola thundering on about the foul fruits of incest, the whispers had finally penetrated inside convent walls to Madonna Lucrezia’s sheltered ears, and she’d stormed and cried and nearly made herself sick with her wailing. And I couldn’t help but notice that not nearly so many of her fine friends came to visit now, those other nobly born young wives of Rome who had brought gossip and laughter and the latest fashions to the Pope’s daughter in her exile. “No one wants to be seen with me anymore!” she shrieked. “I might as well stay here and rot, I can’t face them, everyone’s talking about me—”
Maybe that was when my new mistress’s little face changed from hesitant sympathy to cool hardness when Lord Sforza’s name arose. Because she’d stay in the Convent of San Sisto now until her marriage was annulled, and after that, the Holy Father and Cesare Borgia between them would find her another husband as fast as possible. “They want me out of sight,” I’d heard Madonna Lucrezia wailing to the avid ears of Suora Paolina and Suora Speranza. The nuns were the only audience she had left, and all of them clucked delightedly behind their veils to have such drama in their quiet midst. “Not one word of truth in anything my stupid husband said, and Cesare still says I’ll have to be married again as fast as possible! And until then I have to rot here until the rumors die!”
“I thought you wanted to stay here, madonna.” Pantisilea tried to console her. “Didn’t you just say you couldn’t stand to face everyone with all the whispering?”
More crying then. Logic, I remembered Leonello pointing out once, was not really Lucrezia Borgia’s strong suit.
The bells for Sext began to ring. That placid monotonous sound still sent a spike through my temple like a silver nail. I began to assemble the ingredients I’d need for cena, something cold because Madonna Lucrezia could not abide anything hot in this weather; something sweet because she could not abide anything spiced; not a salad because I could get no greens that were not wilted by heat and chewed by insects; not fruit because fruit arrived in this kitchen only after the wasps had been at it. You’d think that a wealthy convent like this one would feed its sisters like queens, but you’d be wrong. The choir nuns ate well, but from their private stores: the wine and the fine white bread and the fresh fruit they bought with their allowances or received as gifts from their families. They kept the good stuff locked away in their cells, Santa Marta rot them, and didn’t even bother touching the dismal gruel dished up in the refectory. And it had to be dismal, in case any sharp-eyed priest made an inspection with his nose sniffing for sin. “We eat humbly here,” I’d heard the prioress say piously. “Even the most well-born.” And she never bothered to mention that every sister who could afford it just stirred the gruel in her bowl for a while, and then went back to her own cell to dine on fresh bread and apricots and good wine from Ischia.
It had been every bit as bad cooking in the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice, but I’d forgotten how thoroughly, wretchedly soul-flattening it could be when it went on day after day. The murky olive oil and the warped pans and the ovens that didn’t heat properly. If I’d seen Lord Sforza in the flesh, I’d have bound him to a spit and cooked him, because he’d done for me as well as his little wife with all those rumors, whether he’d started them in ignorance or in malice. If Lucrezia was bound to stay at the Convent of San Sisto until her annulment could be finalized, then I was bound to stay too. For the past three months, until the end of the year or maybe all the way into the new year, depending on how long it took the Count of Pesaro to give up his wife.
“If I’m to stay here I’ll at least be well fed,” Madonna Lucrezia had sighed when I ventured to say that my services were required outside convent walls. “You’ll stay as long as I do, Carmelina. And who else is needing you, anyway? Not Giulia Farnese, because she’s gone back to that dull husband of hers, and broken my poor father’s heart, so if you think I’m going to listen to any letters she sends—”
Three months. Three months already, and I knew the convent now. I knew the bells were about to toll before they made a sound, I knew the clang of the gates and the rusty squeak of the grilles when they swung shut, and I knew the anonymous black-and-white-garbed sisters who had now become familiar faces: the sleek-faced prioress who visited the Pope’s daughter daily with an unctuous smile; Suora Paolina, who came from the illustrious Colonna family and was mad for candied cherries; Suora Cherubina, who had a merry laugh and a liking for figs in honey, and all the rest of them. And I did not want to know any of it.
I found myself praying again inside convent walls, and not my usual quick entreaties to Santa Marta so that my bread would rise or my tourtes brown evenly. Santa Marta was cross with me right now anyway, because I never dared take her out of my pouch anymore in the cell I shared with Pantisilea. But when Pantisilea dropped off to sleep I’d look up into the stuffy dark and make my prayers—not to Santa Marta or even the Holy Virgin, but to the Count of Pesaro. Sign your wife away, I prayed. If he could see his wife here, whining and wailing the hours as they passed, he’d have given her up in a heartbeat. Sign and do it quickly, because I want to go home.
I wasn’t really sure where home was, now that the papal seraglio had ceased to exist. But Madonna Giulia would help find a place for me, that was certain. Even in her newly virtuous turn, surely she would aid me if I asked. And of course there was Bartolomeo, cooking away in Vittorio Capece’s palazzo and writing me letters. He wrote a clear, back-slanting hand, and I smiled at the very sight of it because I’d been t
he one to tell him at the age of fifteen how important it was for a cook to know his letters, so he could keep his records without being cheated. I told all my apprentices that, but Bartolomeo had been the only one to listen . . . He didn’t try to woo me anymore, in all these letters he wrote me, and thank goodness for that. He was long past any calf love infatuation by now. He just wrote prosaically of the new kitchens in the Capece palazzo, of the recipes he was making and refining on his own for that book he was still determined to compile. Oh, how it squeezed my heart to open a letter and read: For a tenderloin in the Roman style, signorina, quarter the leanest part of the meat into chunks and space onto a spit with bacon and sage leaves . . .
I dredged a dreary little meal together for Madonna Lucrezia, and when dashing young Perotto swaggered away to his horse and went trotting out of the convent gates, Pantisilea and I carried everything up on trays. Lucrezia was admiring her new embroidered shawl, sitting up in bed trying various effects of draping, her cheeks pink with pleasure as they always were after a good dose of masculine admiration. “More of those blood-orange pastry things?” she said, looking up. “You can’t imagine how I’ve been craving them—”
“Yes, and pork jelly for cena.” I was really rather proud of that jelly. A very substandard pig, but I’d gotten a good flavorful jelly out of boiling the ears and snout and hooves in an even more substandard wine. “Plenty of honey and nutmeg, Madonna Lucrezia; you’ve been liking everything sweet lately, haven’t you? I could only find dandelion greens for a salad, but look how pretty I’ve made them look with these bugloss flowers . . .”
She looked down at the jelly, which I’d arranged so nicely on the plate: quivering and cold, ringed by bay leaves and slivered almonds. “The smell,” she said faintly, pink draining out of her cheeks, and then my jelly went smash all over the floor as the little Countess of Pesaro lunged out of bed, stumbled across her chamber, and vomited just in time into the silver basin she normally saved for washing her hands.
“Madonna Lucrezia—” I began to move across the room but then I froze, shards of broken majolica plate and splats of pork jelly all about my feet. I could feel Pantisilea gaping at my side, still gripping the wine decanter, both of us staring at our mistress and realizing just why she had not left her bed in a month and why she bathed herself alone.
She heaved again into the basin and then straightened, pushing her loose hair out of her face and wiping her mouth. She saw us staring at the rise of her belly beneath her shift and heaved an impatient, dramatic sigh. “Yes, yes,” she said. “I’m to have a child.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.
—MACHIAVELLI
Giulia
My young friends!” Vittorio Capece of Bozzuto approached with open arms as Orsino and I were ushered into his ornate little sala. A sanguine and sophisticated Neapolitan of perhaps fifty, leanly elegant in a sable-furred robe; cheerful, graying, rosy-cheeked. “Your journey was not too tiring?”
“I am too dusty to be allowed in your beautiful home,” I informed him, shaking out my limp skirts. “Evict me at once.”
“Nonsense, m’dear, you’re an ornament to any household. I’m delighted you’ve chosen to adorn mine.” He came to kiss me on both cheeks. “My palazzo is yours, as long as you choose to stay in Rome.”
“Not long,” Orsino hastened to say. His eyes traveled over the coffered ceiling picked out in gilt, the discus thrower carved in exquisite rosy marble beside the doors, the French tapestries of knights and unicorns and maidens skipping through fields of pinks. Fair-haired blue-eyed pages with blue-and-gold livery to match their looks were already taking our dusty cloaks, offering silver basins and rosewater for us to dip our hands, bringing pale sweetened wine in frail-stemmed goblets. “We will be returning to Carbognano soon,” Orsino ventured, looking rather swamped in all the luxurious bustle. “Very soon.”
“Such a pity,” Vittorio Capece said in his Neapolitan drawl. I didn’t think I would ever like any Neapolitans; the Tart of Aragon had spoiled the whole nation for me. But no one could help but be fond of convivial Vittorio, who insisted that even the handles of his doors be works of art. “Haven’t you brought that dwarf bodyguard of yours?” he continued, glancing behind me. “Such a clever little fellow; he admired my red marble and ebony chess pieces so much I didn’t even mind when he beat me three games in a row. I was looking forward to another match . . .”
“I’m afraid Leonello is no longer in my service,” I said briefly, and heard Orsino shift beside me in unstated relief. Even if Leonello hadn’t left of his own accord, Orsino wouldn’t have wanted to keep him on. My husband would never have been comfortable around my bodyguard’s sharp eyes and even sharper tongue, and it wouldn’t have been any use asking Leonello to keep his sarcasm to himself, either. Leonello regarded men like my husband as lions regard lambs—fit only for the sharpening of claws. If Orsino had ever addressed me as “my little rose” in Leonello’s hearing, my bodyguard would have let out a hoot, struck a lovelorn pose, and composed an extemporaneous sonnet on the spot: “Giulia Farnese, the Milk Thistle of Carbognano.” And then he would have followed me about for days saying, “Yes, my little milk thistle?” until I threatened to smack him, and then he’d have grinned his mocking tilted grin and demanded, “Why do women always prefer the trite to the witty? ‘My little rose?’ Dio!”
Oh, but I missed him.
“What a pity, what a pity,” said Vittorio, oblivious. “I thought that little lion was your shadow, m’dear! Well, now, you must be tired; I have had rooms prepared if you wish to bathe and change—”
I had thought Leonello my shadow, too. So selfish of me—you can’t suborn people to be shadows, can you, as if they have no lives of their own? I reminded myself of that, every time I turned to say something to Leonello and then felt the pang of remembering all over again that he was gone. I offered a brief smile to Vittorio and allowed Orsino to lead me toward the stairs.
“It wasn’t a suggestion, that little hint about bathing and changing,” I whispered to my husband as a matched pair of ebony-skinned slave girls whisked us up flights of shallow marble steps. “Vittorio was being very polite, but I could see his agony mounting every time our dusty clothes touched his beautiful carpets.”
“How did you make his acquaintance?” Orsino sounded suspicious. He sounded suspicious whenever I mentioned any man’s name.
“Vittorio Capece is one of Rome’s great collectors of art,” I said. “He said I was the most decorative woman he’d ever seen, and he begged to have my hands sculpted as an artistic study. They’re here somewhere, my marble hands—he stacks his rings on the fingers when he runs out of room on his own.”
Orsino’s voice sounded flat as we were ushered into a sumptuous little sala with an ornate velvet-hung bed and embroidered satin cushions along the wall benches. “He admires you, then.”
“Only as an ornament,” I said lightly, dismissing the little slave girls. “Everyone knows Vittorio will never marry.”
“Why?”
I thought of pointing out the languid, long-legged good looks of every page boy, manservant, and male attendant in this palazzo. And the naked marble figures of Apollo and Pan and David, rather outnumbering the statues of Venus and Diana and Salome. In Carbognano, men of Vittorio’s tastes were spoken of only in whispers, but in cosmopolitan Rome such things were far more casually viewed. I had been shocked at first, but Rodrigo didn’t care who went to bed with whom, and I certainly wasn’t going to spurn poor Vittorio just because ranting men like Fra Savonarola said he was hell-bound. I didn’t think Orsino’s view of the world was quite so flexible, however. “Vittorio chases art rather than women,” I said instead, hanging up my cloak on a silver wall peg. My Pope’s letter had offered to house us in the Palazzo Santa Maria when we brought Laura to Rome, but I had taken one look at Orsino’s face and written a tactful refusal. I knew any number of noble families in Rome who mig
ht have played host for us, even a few of Orsino’s cousins from the family’s more illustrious branches. But for Orsino’s peace of mind I’d chosen Vittorio Capece, whose appreciation of me would be nothing more than aesthetic.
Orsino flushed. “The way men look at you . . .” he began, and trailed off, standing in the middle of the room with his hands hanging at his sides like a little boy. Really, men. Such delicate flowers with their bruised feelings and hurt pride. And they say women are the oversensitive ones!
“The way men look at me?” I kept my voice teasing. “I’ve seen the way all those wives look at you! Envying me my handsome young husband when they have some dour graybeard!” He brightened at that, as I’d intended, and I kissed his cheek. “Let me settle Laura.”
“Surely the maids can do that?” But I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
My daughter had been whisked up to a chamber of her own before she could break any of our host’s costly knickknacks. She was already careening about the room with her nursemaid chasing behind, another maid with a silver ewer of water and a red-haired manservant with a tray trying their best to keep out of the way. “You must rest before the papal audience, little mistress!” But Laura ignored that blithely, running up to present me with a sticky, sugary fig squashed in each fist. “He brought me my favorites!”
“Madonna Giulia.” The red-haired manservant bowed to me, and I found myself recognizing him.
“Bartolomeo!” I greeted him. Holy Virgin, could this really be Carmelina’s favorite apprentice? He had grown.
“I’ve never had the opportunity to thank you for helping me find my post here, Madonna Giulia,” he said with another impeccable bow. “I volunteered to bring up the dishes myself as soon as I’d heard you’d arrived. Sugared figs for the little mistress”—handing another down to Laura—“and marzipan tourtes for your own chamber.” A grin. “And there will be fried smelt from Lake Bolsena for your plate any day you wish it, regardless of what the maestro di cucina has to say.” His grin was infectious.
